LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- U.S. officials said Monday that they were still negotiating with their Iranian counterparts on one of the main issues remaining in their efforts to reach a deal on Iran's nuclear program -- how to dispose of Iran's big nuclear stockpile -- and that shipping the atomic fuel out of the country was still a possibility.
The U.S. officials were pushing back against public statements made Sunday by Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, that seemed to rule out an accord under which uranium would be sent abroad.
"The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad," he said, according to Agence France-Presse. "There is no question of sending the stocks abroad."
Those comments represented an apparent change in position by the Iranian negotiators, who had been reported as having tentatively agreed for months to send a large part of their uranium stockpile to Russia for reprocessing into a form that would be extremely difficult to use in a nuclear bomb.
A State Department spokesman confirmed that the stockpile question remained unresolved while insisting that Iran had not backtracked in recent days. "The bottom line is that we don't have agreement with the Iranians on the stockpile issue," the spokesman, Marie Harf, said. "This is still one of the outstanding issues."
In November, there were reports that Iran had tentatively agreed to send the fuel to Russia for conversion into fuel rods that could power its only commercial power reactor. The proposal to ship Iran's uranium out of the country was seen as giving the talks an important lift.
Converting the material into fuel rods would make it extremely difficult for Iran to use the uranium to build a nuclear weapon.
Harf insisted Monday, after Araghchi said Iran would never give up the fuel, that there never had been a tentative agreement and that shipping the fuel out of Iran was not a requirement for a deal.
"You could have some other dispositions for it that get us where we need to be in terms of our bottom line," she said.
On Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have said they expect a good part of Iran's nuclear material to be removed from the country, the Iranian declaration triggered more unease.
"The shipping out of Iran's uranium stockpile was to be the key administration win in this agreement," Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Monday. "It was presumed they were going to win on that point because they were giving in on every other point.
"Now," he added, "it looks like that rationale is being tossed out the window."
It is unclear how the emerging deal might need to be modified if the accord does not provide for the uranium to be shipped abroad. Some Western officials have said that the issue could be resolved by blending the fuel into a more diluted form and subjecting it to strict monitoring measures.
Negotiators are trying to agree on the parameters of a deal to limit Iran's nuclear program by today.
With the deadline a day away, Secretary of State John Kerry and his other negotiating partners met Monday with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister.
A Section on 03/31/2015